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Recycling Fiend
"The coolest thing I learned at the transfer station was about that nasty smell coming from the garbage truck."
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By Olivia Cueva
I have always hated the smell of the garbage truck. I know you’re probably thinking, of course, it smells like garbage. But to me, the garbage truck doesn’t smell like vomit or like rotten eggs. It smells like burnt Chinese take-out. And it makes me sick.
At my house we recycle and compost. But to be honest, I’ve never actually looked inside our compost bin. All I do is put my banana peels and avocado pits in the plastic juice pitcher by my kitchen sink. My dad’s the one who does the dirty work – turning the compost pile every once in a while. I don’t actually know what happens when the bin in our backyard gets full.
Recently, my class visited the Davis Street Transfer Station, to see where the rest of our garbage goes. It was really inspiring. Listen to me – I sound like such a nerd. We put on hard hats, vests and protective glasses. I felt a little silly in a neon yellow vest, and huge scientist glasses.
We walked up a hill to see the garbage produced from that morning. It smelled awful – worse than burnt chow mein. The seagulls didn’t mind – there were millions of them. We toured a big warehouse filled with stinky trash. We were on a walkway looking down into an Olympic-size swimming pool of garbage. Some of it – wood, cardboard boxes, scraps of paper, plastic bottles and bags – could have been recycled, but people just threw it away.
I learned Alameda County wants to recycle three-quarters of the waste we produce by the year 2010. That’s a great goal, but as of the year 2000, my county produced over 1.5 million tons of landfill garbage every year. That’s a whole lot of trash.
Even though I’ve grown up with a compost bin in my kitchen, it took seeing the loads of garbage filling the Davis Street transfer station to really realize people my age can do so much to help the environment, but we’re really not taking advantage of that. The coolest thing I learned at the transfer station was about that nasty smell coming from the garbage truck. It’s actually biodiesel.
The trucks run on reused cooking oil from places like McDonalds. It’s better for the environment than our regular gasoline because it’s a renewable resource, and it doesn’t pollute the air. When I learned this, it made me really happy because there are so many ways we can conserve energy in our daily lives. And even though it still stinks, I have a new found love for the garbage truck.
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